Blog Comments & Posts

It's easy to dismiss Negative SEO as nothing more than something people moan about when excrement hits the fan.

The fact is there are outfits who can, and are, killing their competitors through malicious link building practices. If you operate within an industry which doesn't traditionally have websites that have extensive backlink profiles, then it's going to be fairly straight forward to manipulate the foot print to look unnatural and trigger automatic filters. The only sites unlikely to be affected by Negative SEO are those which are mid-large sized brands who have 100's of natural links. To manipulate those kinds of foot prints would be uneconomical even for the most skilled "nukers".

Also, why does everyone seem to think Negative SEO is all about "low quality links"? The most obvious method of choice is to attack specific anchor text. They aren't "low quality" links, just a lot of links of varying quality... more often than not the kind that other people would normally want to be acquiring links on anyway. By using the same anchor text it's easy to trip the filter and, to Google's eyes, it doesn't look like an attack as such because the links are the kind that people in that industry would normally acquire in any case.